In This Issue

Welcome

A teacher’s work doesn’t begin or end when they step into the classroom. There’s much more than class time that goes into successful instruction. Professors at universities know that. So do K-12 teachers, corporate trainers, museum educators—anyone who teaches, including, of course, librarians.

Every teaching librarian knows that a single instruction session, let alone a robust instruction program, can require hours of planning, preparation, evaluation, administration, collaboration, and many other big and little things to make it work.

In this issue of Springy News we offer several ways Springshare products can help throughout the process: from scheduling sessions, to creating and using in-class presentations, to engaging students, to making data-driven decisions before and after you enter the classroom.

5 Tips for LibGuides in the Classroom

A great tool for asynchronous online instruction—any time, any place—LibGuides can also be one of your most valuable allies in achieving successful classroom presentations. Here are some tips for making the most of LibGuides as a classroom companion.

All Present(ed) and Accounted For

You’re standing in front of a class, all eyes (and ears) on you. But you’re not alone. You have databases, websites, videos, tutorials, books from the catalog, and more to share.

Use LibGuides as your presentation vehicle, and it’s easy to bring all of them together in one place: organized, attractively displayed, and readily accessible both in the classroom and after the session is done.

Create a course-specific LibGuide.

A LibGuide prepared for classroom presentation is simple to update, too. Is there a resource you need to add at the last minute? Just like that, it’s done. Did a student’s question during the session spur some changes afterward? No need to update a PowerPoint and send a new version to students. Just change the guide and the new info will be there waiting for them.

Don't forget: a key benefit of any instruction session is letting the students know you’re there to support them. What better way to help them connect than through your profile, there on the screen—before, during, and after—along with everything else you provide in your LibGuides-based classroom presentation.

Every class is different, and librarians know how important it is to make their presentations relevant to the specific group of students they’re teaching. But building a guide to present in every class can be time-consuming.

Let LibGuides templates and reusable content save you time.

Your LibGuides site may already have a guide or guides with reusable content—boxes and pages with frequently-needed information that serve as a template for new guides or pages. Add useful things like a catalog search box, stacks map, instructions for remote access, or citation help. You can then add these to new guides with a few clicks instead of reinventing the wheel. Tip: Don't create a copy when you add them to your guide, and yours will be updated automatically, whenever the originals are updated!

If you’re an academic librarian with one or more subject specialties or a school librarian working with particular grades or schools in a larger system, you can create your own reusable pages or boxes, too. Reusable content can be a specific set of databases or a set of research tips tailored to a specific discipline or age level. It can be an RSS feed from your own blog or a relevant website. It can be anything, really, that you think you’ll want to use over and over again.

Once you have your own reusable content to use as a template, you can update or change them anytime - and they’ll change in every course guide in which you’ve put them. Sound convenient? It is. It will save you time you can use to build new guides more quickly -- AND do all the other things you do.

Going to the Polls

Interactivity. It can be an elusive goal in the classroom, especially when you’re doing a one-shot instruction session with students who may never have met you before and don’t know what to expect.

Get things going with an Interactive Poll.

The Interactive Poll is a box type that you can embed in any LibGuide. Have students access your poll on classroom computers—or on laptops, tablets, or smartphones—and they can enter their responses anonymously with the collective responses shown on the big screen.

It's an easy way for students to show what they think and know without being singled out, and it’s a great way to get a discussion going as students see what others thought and then justify their own response.

A poll is not a quiz. There’s no grade and there doesn’t even have to be a right answer.It’s a great conversation starter.

Examples:

Ask students to say how many books they think are in the libraryOR

Whether a particular passage in a paper is plagiarismOR

Which database they'd turn to for research on a particular topic

Creating an Interactive Poll in LibGuides is so easy, you can even create one on the fly in class in just minutes. Give Interactive Polls a try and see what they can do.

Video: Engaging Students with Interactive Polls

Share and Share Alike

If there’s one thing that students know how to do online, it's share. Facebook. Twitter. Tumblr. Instagram. Students love sharing with others the things that amuse, provoke, anger, interest, or puzzle them.

How can you turn this desire to share into a learning experience? With the User Link Submission box in LibGuides, that’s how!

Add a User Link Submission box to your course guide and show it in class. Tell them how it works. Give them a topic—the topic of the course as a whole or something very specific that you and the faculty member devise. Let them know they can add links to anything: websites, books in the catalog, articles found in databases, whatever they think will interest their fellow students and help them explore and learn.

Worried about mischief, malice, or mistakes? As guide author, you’ll be notified of all submissions and will have to approve them before they appear in the guide.

“If you build it, they will come,” as the old line says. If they build it, they’ll not only come, they’ll be partners with you in discovering, evaluating, and sharing information and knowledge.

Speaking of Partners...

. . .your most important partner in classroom instruction is the teacher or professor whose class you're coming to meet. If the faculty member isn't on board, the presentation isn't likely to happen at all. If they're not happy with the results, you may not get invited back.

There are several ways to get faculty input—and buy-in—as you're preparing for a classroom presentation using LibGuides.

First, you can get feedback on your guide before it’s made public by changing the status from Unpublished to Private and sending the URL to the faculty member. Private guides are visible only to those who know the address. Faculty can give input by using the Comment link available on every page and in every box of your guide—or by whatever communication channel they prefer.

Second, you can add faculty members as collaborators on the guide. They won't have a full account in your LibGuides system, but they can log in and contribute in big or small ways to the creation of the guide you’re building for their class. If your library has LibGuides CMS, you can give faculty members—or students, for that matter—”Regular” accounts. Regular accounts have access beyond a single guide, but do not have all of the access that Librarian accounts do.

Different faculty members will be open to different levels of involvement. Some will be more than happy to just leave it in your hands. But give them the opportunity to participate and provide input, as much or as little as they want, and your course guide will be more likely to meet their needs and those of their students.

They reply back requesting a specific librarian - who is not available at all. <of course>

Sigh. You respond, offering to move the session to another week to accommodate the requested librarian

Finally, you've got a date & time nailed down

You then email the instruction librarian

Post the schedule at the reference desk

Bottom-Line: Scheduling a session takes several back & forth emails AND lots of manual work on your part.Is there a better way?

Using LibCal for Faculty Requested Instruction Sessions

Use the room bookings component to take email out of the equation. Create a schedule of availability and faculty can book appointments right through the LibCal system.

Worried about needing to move a booked session? You can require mediation on bookings so you can approve/deny each booking request on a case-by-case basis.

Setting Up Your Room for Booking:

Navigate to Room Bookings within LibCal and create a group for your instruction classroom(s). You'll want to create a custom booking form for faculty to provide details on their instruction request such as what they'd like covered during the session. Give your group a friendly-URL to ensure easy findability.

If you want to moderate all incoming requests, be sure to enable Booking Mediation. If your faculty have a dedicated email domain like @faculty.school.edu, you can even limit bookings to that domain. Once your group and group settings have been defined, time to add your rooms! Add room information like pictures, technology available and even seating.

Time to setup availability! When are librarians available, and for how long, to teach classes? Setup your bookings with that in mind and you're done!

What about Roving Instruction? Follow the same process but add a room titled 'Roving Librarian'.

LibAnswers Update

Scheduled Week of February 25th

Notes Makeover

Notes associated with individual questions got an upgrade:

Multiple Notes - Add multiple notes to questions to track the internal history of a question. Notes are now Rich-Text optimized, so feel free to add links, lists, keywords and even tag questions for later follow-up as a searchable way to retrieve past questions.

Share Notes outside LibAnswers - Ever felt the need to consult on an answer with someone outside of your LibAnswers system? You can now email new notes to accounts and best of all, replies to your notes are automatically added as a new note on that question.

SMS Threading & Updates

We're making it easier to keep track of discrete SMS interactions with:

Better "Previous Messages" Views - We've improved the info on the 'View Previous Messages' link so you'll get a more complete picture.

Edit SMS Transaction & Threads - By default, the system defines an SMS "thread" as all questions & replies from one user in a 24 hour period. If new replies are part of an older original thread, move the new conversation to the old thread.

SMS Notifications to multiple numbers - We've added more notification options to let you know when new questions come in to your system. Head to Admin Stuff > System Settings > SMS Notification Number and add multiple numbers separated with a space.

Secure / HTTPS module

We now offer HTTPS support in LibAnswers - both for full sites, and for widgets and APIs.